Dean Baker: Economists and Future Living Standards--lies about Social Security

[eridani]

http://www.nationofchange.org/economists-and-future-living-standards-1363700536

In other words, the idea that workers in 20, 30, or 40 years will on average have lower after-tax wages than do workers today is absurd on its face. Yet tens of millions of people believe it. This absurd concern has been at the center of national debate for much of the last quarter century.

This is the great Three Card Monte trick. What will matter to the living standards of our children and grandchildren is the upward redistribution that we have seen over the last three decades. If this upward redistribution continues, then most workers will see little benefit from economic growth in the future. In that situation, their living standards may not be much better than those that workers are seeing today and possibly even worse, because a small group at the top will get most of the benefits of growth.

However this is not an issue of intergenerational distribution, it is a question of intra-generational distribution. Yet many economists are running around saying the opposite, arguing that we have to cut Social Security, Medicare and other programs that primarily benefit the elderly in order to help our children.

This speaks to the incredible corruption of the economics profession. The vast majority of economists are supporting, or at least acquiescing, in plans to cut Social Security and Medicare even though they know that the upward redistribution of income is the real threat to future living standards.

[Demeter]

1. Exactly! Thanks for posting

[djean111]

2. Yes. Thank you.

[Dryvinwhileblind]

3. It's not just the economics profession that's corrupt...

...EVERY "profession", with virtually everything controlled by United White Corporate America is rigged, with an entire population being held hostage for the insidious, premeditated cheek of not only electing the Black Man, but not heeding they're numerous warnings about reelecting the Black Man, and not their chosen-by-default One. It's ALL rigged, and it ain't ever going back...not w/o a massive revolution, believe that.

[PETRUS]

4. K&R

[raouldukelives]

5. Children are facing a huge debt. And it ain't monetary, its environmental.

Ask a kid 100 years from now if they would prefer a budget surplus or a viable ecosystem.
The only debt worth struggling to pay back is the one we have rung up plundering the planet and acting like neanderthals with fire everytime a new idea is hatched.
We need to take a huge step back, slow down and try to fix the only debt they will care about tomorrow.

[hay rick]

6. Right on point.

A similar misleading meme is attributing projected shortfalls to low growth instead of redistribution.

[mother earth]

7. There's lies, there's damned lies, and there's statistics. Mark Twain

And isn't it sweet to paint the message any way you'd like. There's an awful stench coming out of gov't, media, all of it. It's like Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burns.

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
Dwight D. Eisenhower